ISLE: A Framework for Image Level Semantic Segmentation Ensemble
This addresses the bottleneck of label availability for real-world semantic segmentation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing image-level methods.
The paper tackles the problem of limited training labels for semantic segmentation by proposing ISLE, a framework that ensembles pseudo-labels from multiple image-level segmentation techniques, achieving up to 2.4% improvement over individual components.
One key bottleneck of employing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks in the real world is the availability of training labels. Conventional semantic segmentation networks require massive pixel-wise annotated labels to reach state-of-the-art prediction quality. Hence, several works focus on semantic segmentation networks trained with only image-level annotations. However, when scrutinizing the results of state-of-the-art in more detail, we notice that they are remarkably close to each other on average prediction quality, different approaches perform better in different classes while providing low quality in others. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework, ISLE, which employs an ensemble of the "pseudo-labels" for a given set of different semantic segmentation techniques on a class-wise level. Pseudo-labels are the pixel-wise predictions of the image-level semantic segmentation frameworks used to train the final segmentation model. Our pseudo-labels seamlessly combine the strong points of multiple segmentation techniques approaches to reach superior prediction quality. We reach up to 2.4% improvement over ISLE's individual components. An exhaustive analysis was performed to demonstrate ISLE's effectiveness over state-of-the-art frameworks for image-level semantic segmentation.